July 28, 2010

Did 24 hour drinking happen and no one invite me?

Much like the baby pigeon of myth, I confess to never having seen a pub that was open 24 hours outside of an airport. So when we are told that the measure didn’t work because we are not a mediterranean country, I have an alternative theory that it didn’t work because it never happened.

Maybe it happened in an alternate universe populated only by right wing columnists and Sky News, but more than a few of my evenings have taken an abortive turn because I couldn’t find a place to drink after midnight that wasn’t a club (which had extended hours anyway). And as far as “unpleasant town centres” go, ’twas ever thus as memory serves. As I recall, the scenes on display during the average Saturday night in York in the late nineties provoked a brief abstention in my teenage years.

Given that this narrative seems to be have been pushed almost exclusively by Sky News and the Dailies Mail and Telegaph, it’s not a leap of faith to assume that the temperance movement yet lives:

But whatever the particular mix of cultural forces that produced it, the endemic British misuse of alcohol is legendary. How could any government – even a hubristic Labour one – have believed that a simple change in the law could have reversed a national tendency that has been recorded by Shakespeare, Hogarth and Dickens?

Nothing makes me want to drink more than the bleatings of a temperance advocate, let me tell you son.